Description Will of John Newbery, late Maltster and Corn and Coal Merchant of Hampton, Middlesex
Date 22 November 1832
Catalogue reference PROB 11/1808
John Newbery left the land and premises on the western end of the property on the north of the Green to his wife, Sarah. After her death, it was to be passed on to his two unmarried daughters, Mary and Barbara. The property on the east side, a “newly erected tenement…with the yard, garden, coach house, stables, outbuildings and offices”, he left to his daughter, Sarah Bachelor Swalling, and granddaughter, Mary Anne Kensett Slade.
Three other properties were given to his remaining three children. He left a Tenement and Malthouse across the river, at Kingston upon Thames in the county of Surrey, to his oldest son, Thomas Newington Newbery (the ancestor of Elizabeth).
John Newbery had built five cottages on land in the Hampton parish known as “Four Hills”; he left this land, with its “cottages, outbuildings, offices and yard gardens” to his son, James Newbery.
He left another Malthouse, outbuilding and yards “in the hamlet of Hampton Court” to his daughter, Deborah.
The will of John Newbery (signed on 12 October 1832) establishes that he was an exceptionally wealthy man for his time. How he came by this fortune is the subject of a romantic and interesting tale that was passed down to Elizabeth’s great great grandfather, Frederick William Newbery, presumably by his father, Thomas Newington Newbery, eldest son of John Newbery.
The tale is told in the following letter, written by Frederick William Newbery on 26 May 1887. The letter was subsequently transcribed by Frederick’s great grandson, Eric William Newbery, in 1980.